The Washington Post reports:

The 50-question exam will be the nation’s first statewide standardized test on health and sex education, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which developed the assessment for grades 5, 8 and 10.

The District’s rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted disease and teen pregnancy are among the country’s highest. Periodic surveys have detailed student attitudes toward risky behavior, but officials said the annual test will fill gaps in their understanding of what young people know and why they might behave the way they do.

“It paints a fuller picture,” said Brian Pick, deputy chief of curriculum and instruction for D.C. Public Schools. “We don’t know as a system or as a city what knowledge kids have about these topics.”

A 2009 District study found that nearly half of the city’s chlamydia and gonorrhea diagnoses were among District residents 15 to 19 years old. Two-thirds of all diagnoses were among those younger than 24. Also, more than 3 percent of District residents older than 12 were living with HIV or AIDS in 2009, the report said.

The initiative may resonate nationally. Also in 2009, the Center for Disease Control found in a study the rate of AIDS diagnoses among young males 15 to 19 years of age doubled between 1997 and 2006, from 1.3 cases to 2.5 cases per 100,000 people. A jump was recorded for other sexually-transmitted infections (STI) among young adults. For Chlamydia, an overview of the report reads:

a total of 1,244,180 cases of sexually transmitted Chlamydia trachomatis infection were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Table 1). This is the largest number of cases ever reported to CDC for any condition. This case count corresponds to a rate of 409.2 cases per 100,000 population, an increase of 2.8% compared with the rate in 2008.

After a multi-decade decline in the rate of syphilis, the STI has rebounded among men and women with increases logged nearly every after 2000.

Meanwhile, the Guttmacher Institute notes 15 to 24-year-olds account for roughly half of the 18.9 million cases of STIs each year, although that age group represents a quarter of all sexually-active persons.

The conference, scheduled for Jan. 22, 2012, at the North Bethesda Marriott just outside of Washington, D.C., falls on two important anniversaries for both sides of the anti-abortion rights movement: the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions, marking the 39th anniversary of legal abortion in the U.S.

“This January, Students for Life of America calls on you to Envision the future of the pro-life movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade/Doe v. Bolton, and a world where no more women cry and no more babies die,” wrote SFLA Executive Director Kristan Hawkins in a press release, which estimates the conference’s attendance at 1,800.

Already, SFLA has carved out panel discussions and strategy sessions that focus not on how to criminalize abortion in all cases, but how to shape the debate and the abortion movement once Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton have successfully been overturned. On the schedule now are sessions titled: “What’s the New Standard of Healthcare without Abortion?” and “How to Bring Healing to Those After Abortion.” Birth control is also on the agenda for discussion.

“Some may say that our theme is too grand, too forward thinking, un-realistic,” Hawkins said. “However, I think it’s just [what] our movement needs. If we are ever going to end legal abortion in America, we need to start talking about it, envision what it will look like, and make our plans for victory now.”

Confirmed conference speakers include the Family Research Council’s Patrick Fagan, Operation Rescue’s Troy Newman, 40 Days for Life’s David Bereit and representatives from the Christian litigation firm the Alliance Defense Fund.

SFLA’s 2011 national conference included Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), author of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” which passed the U.S. House of Representatives this year.

A spokesperson for Lamar Advertising (the company that owns the billboard) said the company decided to remove the billboard because of “concerns for public safety,” according to CNN.

The spokesperson told CNN that the company did not object to the content of the billboard — featuring a picture of a young African American girl and the message “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Rather, the spokesperson said patrons were harassing wait staff at a restaurant in the building to which the billboard was attached, and a protest had been scheduled for today.

A Life Always spokesperson told CNN that more billboards will appear “across the country” in the next couple of months.

In December, Follett told the Texas Independent that he hoped to help groups establish crisis pregnancy resource centers in major urban areas such as Chicago and Washington, D.C. He also said he planned on expanding Heroic to places such as Houston, Connecticut and the Los Angeles area.

The Wall Street Journal reported the advertisement cost $20,000 and was expected to be up for a month, and that Life Always now does not expect to be charged.

Read the Texas Independent for previous reporting on the Follett family’s frozen food fortune and large-scale philanthropy, plus Heroic’s campaigns in Florida and Texas.

Read the Florida Independent for previous reporting on a prominent Florida Republican who said he “does not condone” Follett’s comparison of African American abortions to “genocide,” plus Mike Huckabee’s continuing support of Heroic Media despite criticism from a Democratic Florida congresswoman.

HR471 would provide D.C.parents with $7,500 vouchers, called scholarships under the bill, to use to send their children to any school in the district. During the program’s pilot, it was shown that the program increased graduation rates by 12 percent but did not have any impact on academic achievement.

A report by the U.S. Department of Education, released in June 2010, found, “There is no conclusive evidence that the [program] affected student achievement. On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships.”

But what the program did do was funnel taxpayer money to religious schools; 80 percent of the vouchers were used for religious schools, and 53 percent of those were for Catholic schools. Under the new program, Protestant Christian and Islamic schools are expected to participate.

Catholic hierarchy has vociferously argued for the voucher program as the number of Catholic schools in the nation drops each year.

“The children at Holy Redeemer were, unlike so many of their peers, on the path to college,” wrote the administration of Notre Dame University when the program expired in 2009. “So we were deeply saddened to learn that the impending termination of the OSP has put the school in an untenable situation, leading the pastor to conclude that the school must be closed.”

Constitutional watchdogs say the program is not a good idea.

“I can’t imagine a worse time to unveil a new federal subsidy for religious schools,” the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State said in a statement. “This proposal would add to the federal budget deficit while subsidizing schools that indoctrinate and discriminate in hiring.”

“Public funds should be directed toward improving public schools, not private schools that are unaccountable to the American people,” he said. “Religious schools serve the interests of their religious communities, and taxpayers should not be forced to foot the bill for them.”

Local law enforcement agencies share fingerprints of those they arrest with the FBI to detect fugitives. Some, though, do not want to share this information with immigration enforcement. Four communities — Washington, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Calif., and Arlington, Va. — have so far attempted to opt out of Secure Communities, arguing the program can damage trust in police and threaten public safety.

This is a marked change from previous statements from ICE and Napolitano herself. ICE laid out a process for opting out of the program in an August document called “Setting the Record Straight,” writing that communities could be removed from the “deployment plan” after meeting with state officials and ICE.

In a Sept. 7 letter to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Napolitano confirmed the steps for communities to opt out of the process, even if she never used the words “opt out”:

A local law enforcement agency that does not wish to participate in the Secure Communities deployment plan must formally notify the Asisstant Director for the Secure Communities Program, David Venturella…. The agency must also notify the appropriate station identification bureau by mail, facsimile, or e-mail. If a local law enforcement agency chooses not to be activated in the Secure Communities deployment plan, it will be the responsibility of that agency to notify its local ICE field office of suspected criminal aliens.

It sounds like it’s optional there, but an ICE official confirmed to TWI today that communities can only opt out of receiving information back about the illegal immigrants they detain — not actually opting out of sharing the biometric information itself. As The Washington Post reported last week, Secure Communities is actually an information-sharing program between the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Communities cannot opt out of giving their data to the FBI, so they also cannot opt out of the data going to ICE.

That also directly contradicts previous statements from the government. Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, restated Lofgren’s definition of “opting out” in another letter to the congresswoman, implying localities could, in fact, opt out (emphasis mine):

In your letter, you specifically asked for “a clear explanation of how local law enforcement agencies may opt out of Secure Communities by having the fingerprints they collect and submit to the SIBs checked against criminal, but not immigration, databases.” A local law enforcement agency that does not wish to participate in the Secure Communities deployment plan must formally notify the Assistant Director for the Secure Communities program at ICE and the appropriate state identification bureau (SIB).

The poverty rate is highest in Mississippi (21.9 percent) and lowest in New Hampshire (8.5 percent). The extreme poverty rate — a threshold halfway below the United States’ already very low poverty measure (meaning you have to be very poor to be classified as in poverty, and twice that poor to be classified as in extreme poverty) — is highest in Washington D.C. (10.7 percent) and lowest in Wyoming (3.3 percent).

Interestingly, the survey also shows that Washington D.C. has the highest median household income of any state, at $85,198. That corresponds with the idea that D.C. really is two cities, with a minority of highly educated wealthy folks and a majority of less educated and generally much poorer ones.

The American Lung Association just released its 2009 State of the Air report, which assesses the air quality across the country in terms of ozone, short-term particle pollution and year-round particle pollution. Fargo, N.D. comes out on top — it’s the only city to be among the cleanest in all three categories. Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Bakersfield, Calif., vie for the “most polluted” title.

The report also grades the nation’s air quality on a county-by-county basis. Here in Washington, D.C., it’s an ‘F’ for ozone, and an ‘F’ for particle pollution.

How does your county stack up? Take a look at the charts. (And be forewarned that more than 60 percent of Americans live in counties with unhealthful levels of at least one type of pollutant.)

(H/T Grist.)

Partial transcript of narrator “Pale Horse”:

A peaceful demonstration of at least a million — hey, if we can get 10 million, even better — but at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington. A peaceful demonstration. No shooting, no one gets hurt. Just a demonstration. The only difference from any typical demonstration is we will all be armed.

My first instinct is to say “good luck getting a permit for that,” but my second is to point out that if Pale Horse is serious about keeping out felons, he’ll keep out militia leaders like Mark Koernke.

Also note that the pictures in the video are all from President Obama’s inauguration day.

Update: The Ohio Militia has apparently taken the video down from its YouTube page. However, DoubleDoseUS has a videotaped version of the original video up here.

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

A brave quartet then sang three songs to do our country proud. First up, the national anthem:

Next, “America, the Beautiful,” which has never been so beautiful:

And finally, “God Bless America”:

Next came a speech to get people riled up, particularly the Democrats in the crowd. All one of them:

But my short attention span caused me to lose interest in the speaker and focus on a true patriot in the audience:

–

Follow TWI’s Tea Party coverage on Twitter.

An initially thin crowd in Lafayette Square slowly filled out as people ventured out in the rain.

A volunteer men’s quartet with some, uh, minor tuning issues kicked things off with renditions of “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America.”

This gentleman came all the way from Oregon to demonstrate his frustration with the Fed in front of the White House.

The event was rife with the obligatory communist references, including this shirt purchased from mikechurch.com.

And some Mussolini references too. At least this guy got his first name right.

An event for the whole family.

For everything else, there’s MasterCard.

The opening speaker emphatically declared that the demonstrators were NOT right-wing extremists. This guy begged to differ.

Ah, there’s the tea we’ve been hearing about.

This young man was the only demonstrator I saw calling for Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to be hanged.

Meanwhile, a very different kind of protest was going on across the street.

–

Follow TWI’s Tea Party coverage all day today on Twitter.